Baylor Student Selected for Tanglewood Music Fest

by Richard Veit

Elizandro García, a Baylor University junior from San Ramón, Costa Rica, has been awarded the Boston Symphony Orchestra Clarinet Fellowship to attend the famed Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. He is a student of Richard Shanley, professor of clarinet and coordinator of woodwinds at Baylor.
Being chosen for Tanglewood is a remarkable achievement. According to Shanley, "Elizandro García is, to my knowledge, the first and only Baylor instrumental student to have been selected for Tanglewood-let alone being a fellowship winner."
The Tanglewood Music Festival is an annual summertime event that features chamber concerts, jazz, folk, and contemporary music, as well as concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops Orchestra. It was founded in 1937 (as the Berkshire Music Festival) by Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
Clarinet honors are nothing new for Elizandro García. Last summer, following an international competition, he was selected for a second time to study and perform at the Kent-Blossom Festival with the Cleveland Orchestra. In addition to playing in several public concerts with student chamber music ensembles, he was a clarinetist in the Cleveland Orchestra's performance of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64, with Leonard Slatkin conducting.
This past November, he was one of four finalists for the principal clarinet position in the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra.